I am old enough to have purchased my music over and over in various forms - vinyl, cassette, CD, etc. So unless some mitaculous new format for music appears, I will stick to streaming rather than replicating my library yet again. Amazon Unlimited costs my about the price of one new CD per month and I was spending a great deal more than that back when I was purchasing CDs.
This is me. I am a voracious consumer of new and new-to-me music across many genres. If I were to buy the equivalent albums for what I had to my current playlists on my own, or even worse, what Apple Music’s discovery playlists add, I’d be hundreds of dollars in the hole.
The only physical copies I’ve bought in the recent past were artifacts of Kickstarter or Pledge Music campaigns where I got a CD for being a backer. Those go in a drawer, probably never to be seen again.
That’s not really an unavoidable consequence though. All of my most recent and most popular playlists in Apple Music are stored locally on my phone and laptop. Gigabytes worth of stuff. The only thing an outage will make me miss is something I hadn’t already downloaded, meaning something new I’d like to hear, so in the old model it wouldn’t be something I had until my next trip to the music store.
My Sonos system might stop playing in an outage though. Mostly because I have not yet configured it to ‘see’ the local cache, but I suppose I could fix that pretty quickly given the motivation.
I stopped buying physical copies about 10 years ago but I still buy a decent amount of music per year. Decent as in, 1-2 full albums and maybe a dozen single tracks. Single tracks are almost always for my workout mix, and my workout happens in the pool so I need digital copies not streaming.
I still find a lot of new music. Through:
- TV such as late night shows and episode soundtracks
- Radio but only very rarely now. I listen to my own music a lot more in the car now.
- Rolling Stone magazine. Really. I got a free subscription and enjoy it so much that I keep the subscription going
- Rappers that I like who do collaborations with other rappers then I find stuff I like from the other rappers
I don’t pay for any streaming services. I like a lot of music but there’s just not enough that I like that I don’t own.
I do like using streaming services to check out new stuff before I buy. Mostly free Spotify, or YouTube will have it and I can check it out in full and decide if I want to buy.
I will still buy music if it is not available on Spotify, but I buy it from either BandCamp or Amazon MP3.
Like some others have noted, I like a very, very wide range of music. If I paid for all of the music I listen too, I would need a second job.
I pay very little for music in any form, but what I do, it’s all in CDs or other forms that I can say that I own. I don’t like subscription services for recreation in general, because if I’m subscribing to something, I feel the urge to use it constantly, to get my money’s worth out of it, and I don’t have that kind of time. And I like to listen to an entire album at once, and what I’m in the mood for varies unpredictably, with long periods of time when I don’t bother to put anything on at all.
Same here. I have a pretty good used CD (and DVD) store near me. I’m not interested in new music (though they have plenty of it). I mostly listen to stuff either 40 or 200 years old. It goes to my PC and then on my smartphone which is where I listen to it most frequently.
One thing you don’t get on subscription sites is liner notes which can sometimes be really interesting.
That’s the main reason I buy CDs when I do. I have a USB stick filled with favorite tracks that I keep plugged into the car for general random listening but, if I want to hear an album end to end, I still prefer to just pop a CD into the player. It’s also less fiddling than finding an album on Amazon Music or Google Music while driving.
I’m an album listener, too, and I find it quicker digitally. What’s even greater is that my Amazon Alexa apparently has entire albums it can accesss. Maybe because we’re Prime members? I don’t know, but I know can just say “Alexa, play ‘Kind of Blue’” anywhere on the first floor of my house and, wham, Miles Davis is playing. Or, I could just tell Siri to play my albums, stored digitally on my server. No need to even go looking for physical media. And the files never scratch! 
(I was terrible about keeping CDs in useable condition. I’d guess a full quarter of my collection had points in the album where they’d skip.)
Sure, but the only place I listen to music with any frequency (heh) is in my car. CDs I’m interested in are in the center console inches away. If I do decide I need to listen to an album not physically on me, it’s still accessible via my phone anyway.
Oh, I do the listening part digitally, through iTunes. It’s easier to find stuff in a list on a screen than it is to dig out the physical object every time. I just do the buying via CDs.
Ah. I do have to say, I do miss liner notes and album art. Fifteen years ago when iTunes was well established, I swore up and down I would never pay a buck a song or ten bucks an album when I can go to Best Buy and buy an actual physical product with album art, liner notes, lyrics, the whole thing, for the same price. Apple were mad, I thought, for charging that much for a digital download only product.
Well, here I am fifteen years later. Apparently, while I miss the art and booklet somewhat, the convenience won out (and I actually threw away most of my old CDs because they were just clutter. Pretty much the only ones I kept are ones I performed on, or my friends have.) Plus, I no longer even have a CD player except in the car. None of the five computers in the house have it.(Well, no, one has it, but it’s non-functional.) ETA: wait, somewhere in a box or closet, I do have a CD/DVD burner, but hasn’t been used in four years.
Yes, I use subscription services, and don’t plan on stopping.
Earlier this year, I digitized every CD that I own. Ripped them all to FLAC, and then converted that to 320 Kbps mp3, So I have both lossless and lossy copies. Each CD (or CD set if a multi disc set) went into it’s own folder and I have 530 folders, so that’s 530 CDs that I acquired from about 1985 to 2003 or so (when I first started to use Rhapsody). Now, looking over all of the CDs I have in my music folder, I see that I have some gems that I am really glad to own. I also have a fair amount of dreck that makes me go “WTF was I thinking?” today. Now some of those CD were about $17, some were 10 for a penny, and most were somewhere in between. If I assume that I paid an average of $7 per CD, then I calculate that I spent about $3,700 for my music CDs. The cost of most subscription services is $10 per month, so I what I spent on CDs would pay for just under 31 *YEARS *of subscription service, and with a subscription I have access to way more music than 530 CDs. So It’s an easy decision for me, I still love new music so it’s subscription music from now on, especially since pretty much all services offer 320 Kbps streams or downloads. And with unlimited data becoming a reasonable option for my cell plan, there is no downside to streaming at higher bitrates.
That being said, I find that now that I have everything digitized and downloaded on a 64 GB SD card in my phone, I am listening to the music I bought as CDs more often. And I do occasionally buy a CD, but when I do it’s usually directly from an artist at a show. It’s nice to own something that was handed to you by the person that created it.
Now, I’ll go into a slight hijack: Now that high quality tracks (either streamed, downloaded, or ripped from CDs) are becoming standard, I’m having to use a wired connection between by phone and playback device because Bluetooth absolutely SUCKS, in both sound quality and in ease of pairing to a device. It’s crap, because it never quite works as advertised. On the plus side of that, I’m starting to regain my interest in Hi Fi equipment. You know, because that’s where you get to spend the real money.
I’ve never stopped buying physical media, so yeah.
I’ve never been a fan of renting entertainment. I can buy a used record for $5-10 usually, CDs even cheaper. If it’s popular, rare or new, then it’s often more expensive. But I get to keep it forever, and if I want to listen to it 50 years from now, it’s paid for and still in my collection. It’s not dependent on the service having an agreement with the label or artist, and it can’t be taken back.
Now, there are some recordings that are too rare or expensive for me to get, and Youtube has most of those if I’m willing to watch a commercial for them.
FYI, Tidal now has a completely free trial period until 05 January. As in you only need an e-mail address, no credit card required. And it includes their highest quality streams (select the HiFi account when signing up). I’m seriously impressed by the sound, listening to their Al Jarreau playlist now. If you want to try a streaming service but were put off by needing a credit card even for the trial period, you might want to check this out.
I think I had a Pandora account when it first came out but didn’t use it much. I acquire my music according to what takes my fancy.
My usual sources for new stuff are things that I hear on Triple J, the national broadcaster, which has a pretty wide ranging playlist, and Metacritic which is set up so that finding new releases I may like is simple.
I purchase CD’s, from iTunes or Amazon mp3’s whichever is least expensive. Through my local library I have access to a free streaming service. So I can listen for free and then decide if I like a particular song or artist.
I buy Weird Al CD’s (or ask for them for Christmas) when they come out, otherwise most of my music now just involves searching for the song on youtube.
No need to burn a copy if you order from Amazon. With a few exceptions if you purchase a CD from Amazon they include a mp3 download, often for less than the download itself. For instance, I was looking at an album the other day. The mp3 was $10.49. The CD was $7.99 and included a mp3 download. A few days later the CD showed up. My wife and I have hundreds of CDs from Amazon still in their wrappers thanks to the included mp3 downloads.